Organisms and institutions maintain reserves to absorb shocks.
Reliability engineering, and the biological version is well documented: organs have reserve capacity far above normal demand. Institutions that run at full utilisation have converted a margin into a fragility.
In practice
- A hospital that runs at 100% bed occupancy has no capacity for a bad week, and a bad week arrives annually.
- A household with no savings treats a broken boiler as a crisis, and the boiler was always going to break.